Rivers, Daniel Winunwe. Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States Since World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

Historians Rebecca L. Davis and Daniel Winunwe Rivers examine how sexuality shaped Americans’ concern for preserving heterosexual marriage during the twentieth century. Both authors begin at different historical moments; Davis starts with the advent of modern marriage counseling during the 1930s whereas Rivers begins with the emergence of gay and lesbian rights during the Cold War. Despite their temporal differences, each describes the social and political upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s as a turning point in the history of marriage and the construction of the American family. In More Perfect Unions, Davis argues that since the 1930s marriage counselors have taught heterosexual couples to pursue marital bliss by performing normative gender roles, although each generation redefined the extent to which a “more perfect union” could be found through personal fulfillment or socioeconomic stability.[1] More concerned with the role of sexuality and conceptions of the ideal American family, Rivers’s account showcases how gay and lesbian families helped dismantle the assumption that all families are heterosexual. In Radical Relations, Rivers claims that since 1945, lesbian mothers, gay fathers, and their children recast the relationship between sexuality and the family by creating new childbearing relationships that demonstrated the compatibility of homosexuality and parenthood.[2] Together, More Perfect Unions and Radical Relations provide a dynamic and nuanced understanding of how Americans redefined marriage, sexuality, and family relationships during the mid-twentieth century.

In More Perfect
Unions, Davis looks at the theories and practices that professional
marriage counselors, clergy, social scientists, and psychiatrists used to
promote normative gender roles and heterosexual relationships. She explains
that up through the mid-twentieth century, couples around the world received
marriage advice through community networks, churches, and physicians. During
the Great Depression nobody questioned the argument that heterosexual marriage
strengthened the economy. State relief programs and birth control clinics, for
instance, promoted marriage counseling as a way to escape the economic turmoil
found in their families and the nation.[3]
WWII programs like the Rosie the Riveter campaign brought women into the
workforce and disrupted normative gender roles by turning women into
breadwinners. The sudden increase in female employment also served as a way for
marriage counselors to incorporate the new rhetoric of psychoanalysis during
marriage counseling. Counselors and social workers argued that female
employment led to unhappy marriages and “socioeconomic chaos” because women’s
economic independence made them neurotic housewives and encouraged men to shirk
familial duties like providing wages.[4]
Here Davis suggests that during the postwar years marriage advice promoted
quantitative testing inspired by social scientists like Lewis Terman and the
American Institute for Family Relations (AIFR) as a seemingly objective way to
obtain a healthy “marital adjustment” where wives ascribed to certain
personality traits that encouraged them to rely on their husbands for emotional
support and affirm their husbands’ masculinity.

Davis concludes by arguing that from the late 1960s through
the 1970s, marriage counseling moved into churches, where it survived the
counter culture’s attack on gender norms and the heterosexual “marital
adjustment” by aligning with New Right evangelicalism.[5]
Clerical marriage counselors incorporated elements of the new field of
humanistic psychology, such as self-actualization, into counseling services.
These marriage counselors, however, diverged from modern scientific
developments, such as the Kinsey reports, which challenged heterosexuality and
gender norms; they used counseling to prevent premarital sex, discourage the
use of contraception, and prevent couples from divorcing. Davis clarifies that
throughout the 1970s and 1980s, marriage counseling literature, including
Marabel Morgan’s Total Women,
maintained the assumption that by protecting normative gender roles—including
female deference and male breadwinning—couples could redeem society from the
perils of a rising rate of divorce and homosexuality. By the twenty first century
state-sponsored marriage counseling programs like the Healthy Marriage
Initiative claimed that heterosexual marriages were capable of eradicating
child malnourishment and preventing delinquency. Heterosexual marriage and
two-parent families, proponents optimistically maintained, could even prevent
poverty and ensure the nation’s socioeconomic future.[6]

Davis’ work is an important contribution to the literature
on marriage and the American family because it reveals how new developments in
psychology contributed to the belief that heterosexual marriage and the nuclear
family would cement the nation’s socioeconomic future. Still, More Perfect Unions falls short in its
discussion of the evangelical New Right. Davis argues that those concerned with
saving marriage (evangelical preachers and psychologists) survived the counter
culture’s attack on heterosexual marriage because they allied with the New
Right. For instance, Davis argues that evangelical self-help publications like By His Side: A Woman’s Place and Total Women were best-selling works that
garnered the attention of the Christian community and helped to legitimize
marriage counseling.[7]
However, the degree to which Christian couples read and applied ideas in
self-help publications, such as wifely submission and marital bliss, to their
lives and political decisions remains unclear in Davis’s work. Admittedly, it
is difficult—and even at times impossible—for historians to trace the
receptibility of ideas. But purchasing self-help publications that promoted
heterosexuality and normative gender roles is not akin to ascribing to and
acting out heterosexuality and normative gender roles. That aside, Davis
successfully demonstrates the prevalence and longevity of the idea that
marriage could be both a source of personal happiness and a responsibility to
the state.

Davis is interested in how the state used marriage
counseling to promote heterosexuality and socioeconomic stability while Rivers
is more concerned with why Americans and the state assumed all families were
heterosexual. He looks to a wide variety of sources—LGBT rights and family
organizations, newspapers and periodicals, personal papers (uniquely including
one activists’ day planner), court cases, and over one hundred personal
interviews—to showcase how homosexual families created a “family revolution” by
entering the public spotlight amid a broader reproductive rights movement and
sexual revolution.[8]
Rivers begins by looking at Cold War-era gay and lesbian rights efforts. He
argues that while many gay and lesbian parents “came out” to themselves, and
sometimes their spouses, few were able to be open about their sexuality. Many
feared that police raids, sex-crime panics, and vice squad entrapment would
lead them to lose custody of their children.[9]
Rivers explains that the widespread assumption that motherhood and fatherhood
were heterosexual led judges to argue it was “in the best interest” of children
to be removed from the care of their lesbian mothers and gay fathers.[10]

The second half of Radical
Relations looks at the way that lesbian mothers and gay fathers founded
support organizations like Dykes and Trykes and fought for legal rights.
Radical feminists during the 1970s, for instance, formed separatist (and
sometimes female-exclusive) lesbian communities where they taught children the
importance of equality. The shared experience of losing custody rights and
dealing with legal bias among gay and lesbian families convinced them to form
grassroots activist organizations in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a move
that changed the fight for parental and adoption rights and improved legal
outcomes for gay and lesbian families.[11]
Gay and lesbian baby boomers’ legal contests, in the wake of the HIV/AIDs
epidemic, led to some legal victories like the establishment of second parent
rights and domestic partnership status.[12]
Rivers concludes that these limited successes, along with the Lawrence v. Texas decision to strike
down sodomy law, not only moved gay and lesbian families from the periphery of
the LGBT rights campaigns but also ensured that gay and lesbian families would
become central to contemporary same-sex marriage debates in the 1990s and
2000s.

Importantly, Rivers’s Radical
Relations has incorporated gay and lesbian families in the existing
literature on marriage and the American family. Yet there are also a few
moments where Rivers’s focus on legal reforms sought by gay and lesbian
families obscures their connection to the larger historical context. Throughout
Radical Relations, for instance,
Rivers argues that the movement for gay and lesbian families’ rights was part
of the reproductive rights movement and sexual revolution—it was really a
“family revolution”—because a new generation of gay and lesbian couples pursued
artificial insemination or adoption and brought homosexual families out in the
open.[13] Rivers
provides sufficient evidence to demonstrate that this reproductive and legal
aspect of the “family revolution” produced a substantial lesbian and gay-by
boom by the 1980s. Yet he is less clear about how gay and lesbian couples in
the “family revolution” felt connected to or disconnected from some of the larger
ideas like free love, bodily autonomy, and anti-monogamy that permeated the
sexual revolution and reproductive rights movement. Still Rivers breaks new
ground by showing that ideas about the family and sexuality are inextricably
linked because of the long-held assumption that the American family is
necessarily heterosexual.

Rivers’s discussion of homosexuality, marriage, and families
complements Davis’s scholarship by highlighting one response to the New Rights’
emphasis on protecting heterosexual marriage. And, importantly, both Davis and
Rivers showcase how people responded to the state’s presumption that marriage
and the family were heterosexual in the mid-twentieth century. Davis focuses on
campaigns to preserve and bolster the idea that personal fulfillment and
socioeconomic stability could be found through heterosexual marriage whereas
Rivers emphasizes how homosexual families challenged the assumption that all
American families were heteronormative. Taken together, More Perfect Unions and Radical
Relations provide a comprehensive and engaging consideration of sexuality,
marriage, and how the state has helped define and ascribe meaning to the
American family during the mid-to-late twentieth century.

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Essays in History

Established in 1954, Essays in History is the annual publication of the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. EiH publishes original, peer-reviewed articles in all fields of historical inquiry, as well as reviews of the most recent scholarship. EiH serves as a resource to students, teachers, researchers, and enthusiasts of historical studies.